When It Comes to RFQ Response, Time Is Money

Quick: What’s the most important function within your job shop?

Here’s a clue: It is arguably the most fragile part of the operation.

Answer: Quoting.

While that might seem to be a bit of an exaggeration, consider this: If you don’t estimate and quote jobs efficiently, quickly, and consistently, then you’re either not going to win work, or you will win jobs that will ultimately prove to be unprofitable. But what makes it fragile? You may be depending on your most-experienced machinist to help provide input for your quoting. If it so happens that that person catches something or goes on vacation, your ability to get profitable jobs coming in the door is hampered, to say the least.

On the other hand, you might be depending on, well, you to do the job. And when you’re quoting, you’re not growing the business (as in finding other prospects) or managing the operations because you’re otherwise occupied – quite possibly for hours or even days.

There is one more element to add to this: Timing.

Let’s face it: Nowadays people don’t want to wait for anything, whether it is a package from Amazon or a quote on X-number of machined components. To get in the game you need to be fast. And to stay in the game you need to be accurate from the standpoints of both delivery to the customer and whether you can make money making the parts.

Research from Paperless Parts indicates that it can take up to two hours to generate a quote for a single part. That process includes getting the RFQ, putting it in the system (typically a manual task), having engineering work on it (e.g., determining whether it can be done on the available spindles), assessing the availability of materials (an increasingly large consideration based on the supply chain disruptions that are now part of everyday work), determining the price for the job, reviewing the work, making sure that the production capacity will be available to meet the due dates, contacting outside suppliers (say, tooling and materials) to make sure that they will be responsive to the needs of the job.

Often, doing all of that could take more than two hours, and if Bob or Sally (your go-to people on the shop floor) are out, then your shop might not get the quote out at all. But what is the solution to this problem?

In a word: Automation.

A Quoting Solution

Just as physical automation can increase the throughput in a shop, digital automation can do it for the estimating and quoting activities. According to Paperless Parts, its cloud-based secure platform can make the quoting process fast: 15 minutes to do the job that would otherwise take the aforementioned two hours.

Essentially, this is done by centralizing the quoting process into a single platform where all quoting data is stored and searchable. Manufacturers can view both PDF and 3D CAD files from Paperless Parts to understand everything about the part or assembly they are quoting from the setup to the machining requirements.

“Quoting was becoming a full-time job in and of itself when we just didn’t have the time.” – Cody Stephenson, Co-Founder of Double Tap Engineering

This is not something that is going to take months to implement, either. The Paperless Parts team is dedicated to helping customers realize immediate value from the platform, which happens as soon as they receive access. When customers are able to follow a targeted onboarding plan, most deployments are completed in a matter of weeks, and sometimes in just a single week.

Implementing Paperless Parts is not a huge lift there in terms of time spent, and extraordinarily worthwhile because it has been determined that when there is a fast, accurate quote delivered to a prospective customer, that customer is much more likely to place the order with you.

For most shop owners, the more orders that can be won – and done so with margins intact – the better it is for everyone. While it sounds good, here are some actual examples of how Paperless Parts is saving real shops significant time and helping them make money, even in cases when their Bob or Sally are out of the office.

Quick Takes on Time to Quote

Let’s take a look at some real use-cases:

A real time-saver

Black Mountain Manufacturing is a contract shop in Greeley, Colorado that has milling, turning, water jet cutting, MIG and TIG welding, laser cutting, sheet metal forming, and pipe fabrication on its floor. It is an ISO 9001-certified shop. That of course means it consistently produces products that meet high customer and regulatory requirements.

Not only does it meet customer requirements consistently, but frequently. This is because it has implemented the cloud-based quoting system.

Co-Founder and Production Manager Jonathon Friedl had been in charge of the quoting. He developed a highly detailed spreadsheet approach, but one problem was that they weren’t analyzing the geometry of the parts. This meant that quoting was a laborious task that took days, and an ERP system didn’t help the way they had hoped. They hired a software developer who created an ERP-like system that included geometry analysis, but this attempt did not work as expected.

Friedl thought about creating his own system for the shop, but instead they deployed Paperless Parts at Black Mountain. This decision was made to take advantage of Paperless Parts&rsquo cloud-based quoting system, which has enabled Black Mountain Manufacturing to easily analyze the geometry of parts during quoting, cutting days out of the process. It took two weeks to get it up and running. 

Two weeks.

The spreadsheets have given way to a system that uses a geometric engine that drives the pricing formulas. The Paperless Parts software analyzes the CAD geometry so that setups, setup times and production run times can all be part of the calculations. As PDF quotes have given way to digital quotes, Friedl says they’re responding to RFQs three times faster than they had been before. “The quicker you deliver a quote, the more likely you are to win the job,” he says, which is good news for Black Mountain Manufacturing.

What’s more, Friedl is no longer the person responsible for all quotes. An estimated 90% are handled by an administrative employee who works with the Paperless Parts system.

A week to successful deployment

While its official name is Jacksonville Precision Manufacturing, in a time-driven world they more often go by Jax Precision. The Florida-based shop handles materials from aluminum to tool steels, copper to titanium. Its runs go from single parts to 1,000. Founder Juan March established JAX in 2018 and had been developing customer quotes himself. On average, it took from three to four days.

After implementing Paperless Parts, the quoting process is six times faster. This means that a two-day quote of the past is now an hour. Notably, it took just a week for March and his team to master the software.

Now the shop is quoting 2.5 times more jobs every month and has increased revenue by over 300%.

When people want the parts fast, they will pay

Focused on Machining – which performs precision CNC milling (3- and 4-axis, vertical and horizontal) and CNC turning for prototyping as well as higher volume runs – serves industries including aerospace, medical, energy and defense. The shop deployed Paperless Parts in 2019.

One of the things that company President Justin Quinn says hadn’t been part of their offerings was an expedited delivery fee. Paperless Parts provides the option to include expedite fees in digital quotes to enable shops to get paid for the speed of their work. They found that part buyers are expecting faster turnaround times and are willing to pay for speed. In the first year after implementing Paperless Parts, Focused on Machining achieved 3.5% more revenue based on the expediting premium.

The art of the five-minute quote

Sweetwater Machine Shop in Sweetwater, TN, performs a variety of CNC milling and turning, as well as surface grinding, CNC plasma cutting, heat treating and more. Shop President and Owner Jordan Raper says that quotes that used to take him 30 minutes to produce pre-Paperless Parts now take only 5 minutes, a 6-times increase in speed.

Raper credits Sweetwater Machine Shop’s success with Paperless Parts to how customized the platform is to his shop, enabling his team to achieve maximum efficiency in quoting. “With Paperless Parts, you’re not getting some cookie cutter, generic software,” Raper said. “Unlike a typical CAD or CAM system, you have the ability to sit down with the Paperless Parts team to fine tune and sculpt the software to fit your shop.”

Work all day. Quote all night.

Smaller shops like Double Tap Engineering can also benefit from Paperless Parts’ quoting system. According to Co-founder Cody Stephenson, it cut quoting time by two thirds and freed his time for actual manufacturing.

“For a long time, I was having to stay up until after midnight quoting jobs in my garage,” Stephenson recalls. He adds, “Quoting was becoming a full-time job in and of itself when we just didn’t have the time.” After all, the business is milling, turning, fabricating, and laser cutting. Quoting was taking time away from being able to focus on running the business.

Implementing Paperless Parts resulted in taking a 60-minute quote down to less than 20 minutes to build a quote. Standard quotes – facilitated by a system storing information about quotes and other helpful information – with 50-to-100 elements takes a of couple minutes. Mike Stepheson, Cody’s father and the other co-founder, says that he had been “less helpful in the quoting process because it took [him] so much time.” Now he’s involved, too.

Which means that if Cody Stephenson is otherwise occupied, the quoting process can continue.

Simplifying complex processes

Vaupell Molding and Tooling is a multifaceted prototyping and production company that works in molding, composites, additive manufacturing, tooling, machining and other areas of manufacturing for the defense, aerospace and life sciences industries. Unfortunately, the company’s New Hampshire-based Rapid Solutions group – which focused on prototyping and light production – had developed an unwieldy quoting backlog that it sought to eliminate through automation.

Business Development and Department Manager Andy Reeves was worried the company would have to build their own system. “When we initially began looking into quoting automation solutions,” he says, “we thought that we ultimately might have to develop the solution in-house – at a cost of roughly $1 million – to achieve the flexibility that we need for quote automation of multiple, diverse production processes.”

Fortunately for Vaupell, that was not necessary. “Because the Paperless Parts algorithm is based on our actual costs and inputs, it provides the flexibility that we need to streamline and automate quoting for all jobs, prototyping processes, and manufacturing methods,” Reeves says. This serves the needs of Vaupell’s diverse manufacturing capabilities and has enabled the company to eliminate its quoting backlog.

This automation was sorely needed. “The way that we developed quotes in the past required several applications to interrogate the model for manufacturability, populate a spreadsheet to calculate costs, and  feed our [ERP] system,” Reeves says. This meant putting the same data into multiple systems, dragging the process to a crawl.

Now quotes are out the door in under 24 hours. “Time is valuable,” Reeves says, “and with Paperless Parts, we can create and send out 20 quotes in the time that it used to take us to complete one.”

You read correctly: the company is quoting work 20 times faster.

Something To Consider

Think of this observation from Juan March of Jax Precision: “Younger engineers today are used to instant-quoting experiences from huge corporations. Paperless Parts allows us to quote quickly and accurately so we can stay competitive with the large players in our industry.”

If you’re generating quotes using Excel spreadsheets and PDFs and those young engineers are on the receiving end, how are they going to consider your firm? Probably like something from an earlier time. Which isn’t advantageous to your profitability. With Paperless Parts, you project the image of an advanced, modern manufacturer by getting accurate quotes out quickly and efficiently. Modern quoting is competitive, profitable and fast with Paperless Parts.

Request a Demo to learn how Paperless Parts can help your team quote faster, smarter, and more consistently.